Ribble Pro Cycling’s David Hewett’s Blog

August has been a little bit of a disappointing month for me in some ways. It started with me messing up a big target race and ended with two races heavily disrupted by illness. Having said that, these sandwich a road race win so there’s been success too.

Instead, I’ve just had a solid month of pretty consistent training and racing, with one or two decent results thrown in for good measure. The form has been a little bit patchy, with a handful of days of slight fatigue balancing out periods where I had great legs, but on the whole it has been a relatively successful month.

Readers of my previous blog post may have been left with a slight sense of dispiritedness or melancholy, and rightly so; things really weren’t going all that well for me and mentally I had got myself into a bit of a mess. That’s the “tl;dr” summary of last month out of the way!

The interest in that blog post and the messages of support received on the back of it were overwhelming and greatly appreciated. I hope that at least a few readers have been finding my ramblings vaguely interesting and enjoyable to read.

I’m not really sure what to say about the month of May. I haven’t been training very well, I haven’t really performed in most races (best result has been 20th in a 1.12A kermesse, one of only two races I’ve finished this month), and on the whole I haven’t particularly enjoyed riding my bike all that much.

The more I’ve been into cycling seriously, the more I’ve come to realise it’s not so much a physical sport but a mental one. Sure, it’s highly demanding physically, perhaps more so than any other sport in the world. You have to flog yourself in all conditions for hours upon hours each day, even when you’re exhausted, and then on top of that you’re only ever one pedal stroke away from sustaining anything from painful road rash which you have to continue riding with, or a career ending injury, or worse…

The beginning of April finally marked the start of my 2017 race season in Belgium, after a long winter’s preparation. An unfortunate issue with the team’s accommodation arrangements for the year meant I had to head home unexpectedly immediately after arriving in Belgium, and this knocked me a bit sideways mentally for a while.

Despite this, I managed to organise a 16 day racing trip along with my British teammate, George Wells, in which time we stayed in Lille and I lined up at seven kermesses and one interclub. Clearly, doing a race on average every other day is very demanding, but the idea was to do as much racing as possible during this two week block. This would hopefully have the effect of sharpening up the legs by getting some race speed in them and generally getting back into the rhythm of the fast-paced style of racing found in Belgium…

At the end of my last blog post, I explained that I had left Girona, having got a good few weeks of initial base miles in the tank, and had returned home to spend Christmas with my family. After six days at home relaxing and enjoying the festivities, I packed what felt like almost all my worldly belongings into my car (including almost £20 worth of Sainsbury’s crunchy peanut butter jars), and set off at 4:30am on 29th December towards Dover ferry port.

This was the start of an epic 2,300km, two day road trip from my house in Kent to Almería in Andalusia, southern Spain. 16hrs after shutting my front door and numerous BlaBlaCar passengers later, I arrived at my overnight stop in Girona.

Firstly, a warm welcome to my new blog which aims to document my 2017 season of training and racing in Belgium with PCT Tomacc. Thank you for taking the time to read my ensuing ramblings, I hope you find them of some interest and if not, I can only apologise for being so dull in nature. In this edition there is an overview of the first half of my winter training, from picking myself up and dusting myself off after my collarbone break in September through to full gas December endurance training in Girona… Having returned from Belgium just a few days previously, on the 9th September I crashed whilst training in Cornwall and shattered my right collarbone into five pieces.

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